This volume is dedicated to those local heroes of Middle East and North African cities who, across the millennia, have defied killing solidarities and conventional boundaries to embrace the humanity and potential of “the other” in their midst.

Contents

Preface, ix Contributors and Their Entries, xi List of Entries, xiii Foreword by Janet L. Abu-Lughod, xv Reevaluating the Past, Rethinking the Future, by Michael Dumper, xvii The Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Seeing Cities Comparatively, by Bruce Stanley, xxiii Regional and Sub-Regional Maps, xxvii Cities of the Middle East and North Africa, 1 Glossary, 401 Timeline: Dynastic and Imperial Ages, 405 Index, 411 About the Editors, 439

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Preface
This volume is motivated by a simple premise: Cities need to be brought back into the analysis of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Long obscured by a focus on the empire or the state, their agency denied and curtailed, cities can and should receive greater attention from those interested in the region. There are many reasons for advocating this position. One of the most telling is the depth of involvement cities have with conflict and violence.As the last details on the production of this volume are being accomplished, Beirut and Tyre are exchanging bombs for rockets with Tel Aviv and Haifa. Whole districts of Beirut have been reduced to rubble, access to Tyre has been cut off, major energy and transport networks crucial to urban functioning have been destroyed, hundreds of thousands of displaced persons are on the move, while almost half of Haifa’s population has fled the city. Other cities in the region are also experiencing ongoing conflict as well: Baghdad and Basrah are torn apart by daily violence; Istanbul has experienced another explosion; Mogadishu has been conquered by forces of the Islamic Courts.It is hard to escape the conclusion that conflict among, about,and directed towards the cities of the Middle East,ongoing for five thousand years,remains a fundamental component of contemporary urban life in the region.Such events draw our attention to the cities of the region, and force us to admit that any attempt to understand the region’s current dynamics without considering the urban,at least as a site for conflict and violence, misunderstands the MENA. There are, however, many other reasons to divert attention from states and empires to cities in the Middle East and North Africa other than the fact that regional security is now primarily urban in its location, incubation, and management. Fundamentally, the processes and dynamics of conflict transformation in the region are also urban based and urban driven in their requirements. Post-conflict development, as well as sustainable economic development, also crucially depend on the vitality and involvement of cities: Just ask the people of Haifa, Beirut, Mogadishu, or Mosul. The alleviation of poverty and exclusion can not ignore the inhabitants of the shanty towns,gecekondu, and bidonvilles of Port Sudan,Algiers,Izmir, or Nouakchott or they will not succeed.The expansion of political space in the MENA can only start from acknowledging that civil society is urban based and urban dependent, and must be nurtured by the city. Long-term analysis of the regional future also forces an urban sensitivity.Whether it is global warming, and its implications for agriculture, urbanization and migration, or water scarcity and declining aquifers, the effects in the MENA city will be profound. Population growth, and the in-migration to cities, will dominate urban politics and the search for a voice for the disenfranchised. Another reason to recenter the city in our understanding of the Middle East and North Africa is the obvious vitality of the region’s cities.The everyday of MENA urban life drives the economy, politics, and social development of this disparate region. Young people in Cairo and Manama queue up to hear Nancy Ajram, despite the dire warnings of religious leaders and politicians about the imminent demise of society as we know it.City residents still flock to the beaches of Aqaba/Eilat, Baku, Gaza, or Casablanca for family time away from the heat of the city. Suitcase smugglers continue to ply their trade between Bandar Abbas and Dubai, Istanbul and Varna, Tangier and Tarifa despite state boundaries. Religious broadcasts from Qom are sold as DVDs on the streets of Manama, Djibouti,Marseilles,and Zanzibar.Flights still converge on Dubai and ships full of sheep leave Berbera.Architectural restoration continues in the kasbah of Nablus, on the medieval high rises of Aden, or the mosques of Timbuktu. Human rights activists still protest in Tunis and in Tabriz.The Middle East and North African city is humming,providing the buzz and hope that has always marked its city system. It is this undeniability of the role of the urban in understanding the Middle East and Africa,no matter the policy horizon, which has stimulated the production of this volume. In a context where the power of the MENA city has tended to be ignored,misunderstood,or downplayed,the editors wished to redirect attention, to “bring the city back in,” to the discussion about regional agency, decision making, and policy. Equally, however, we felt that the city was being excluded from the historical narrative.Analysis of the Middle East and

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North African city has often been disjointed, focusing on particular periods in the trajectory of a city rather than taking a perspective over the longue durée of a single city or of urbanism’s place in regional development. Few cities in the region have been approached as a conceptual whole, and we wanted to make a statement about the usefulness of such a perspective. Likewise, the region is often framed for students through its religious or ethnic differences, obscuring the pluralistic urban reality lived by its people.A city perspective thus begins to subvert such traditional framings of the region, opening up an alternative spatial vision and approach. By examining cities as a whole, a different relationship and dynamics is revealed. Within this volume the reader will find two primary perspectives on “the city.” One stresses a city’s historical uniqueness, autonomy, particularistic heritage, and trajectory. The other looks to the networks of flows and ties that link one city to another, and thus views the city through the lens of its

embeddedness and ties. Both are essential to understanding the role of cities in the Middle East and North Africa. This volume, like the urban itself, begins each narrative with human creativity, and should end with human potential. The MENA urban story contained in these pages includes significant misery,destruction,political folly,and the dominance of the powerful, but it also affirms the regenerative power and transcendence of the human spirit. Out of destruction can come renewal,learning,creativity,and openness.It is this story that the MENA city can also tell. This story would not be told if not for the work of the wonderful production team at ABC-CLIO. Martha Gray has been a jewel, overseeing the complicated final process with understanding and skill. Alex Mikaberidze kept the project moving during its vital middle phase with kind encouragement.Anna Moore and especially Kristine Swift stepped in to keep the project from falling behind. Our thanks to them. —The editors

Foreword
This is an unusual contribution to the literature on cities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region— deserving much applause for its ambitious decision to cover 100 cities by essays that are remarkably sophisticated and historically embedded and for the skills and energies of the editors,who have written different dovetailed introductions and, between them,have authored more than half the entries.(The rest have been written by trusted colleagues chosen for their specialized knowledge of particular subregions.) The limited number of contributors provides a rare balance between unity of purpose—manifested by writing styles that maintain comparable levels of serious scholarly sophistication and the flexibility to vary the contents to emphasize the successive cultures and periods of greatest importance to their individual formations and transformations. Unlike the city chapters in other encyclopedias (Britannica’s specialized urban encyclopedias such as the 2002 massive four-volume Grolier Encyclopedia of Urban Cultures), where unity is achieved by requiring individual authors to follow similar outlines,relevant or not,the present format provides an unprecedented opportunity for the authors to capture the depth and diversity of cities located within a common but hardly uniform region. This collection strongly resists the temptation to reduce its intellectual demands on readers to their lowest common denominator. Each entry presumes some knowledge of the geographical setting and some familiarity with the long stretch of shifting imperial control,religious sects,and even dynasties. While this limits the number of its potential users,it offers rich rewards to its readers, dedicated students and scholars alike, who seek to widen their reach,to develop comparisons,and to hone better,if more limited,generalizations about cities in the MENA region. I am particularly excited by the promise that the encyclopedia will be available on the Web.With a comprehensive index to link and sort entries into geographical,historical,and functional categories of the user’s design,this book is an extremely valuable tool,not only for searching specific entries but for formulating creative and synthetic scholarly hypotheses. My congratulations to the editors and authors for this excellent work. Janet L. Abu-Lughod

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Reevaluating the Past, Rethinking the Future
The cities of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) evoke many vivid and colorful images. Bustling market areas and crowded caravansaries are found alongside lush, watered gardens or spacious mosque courtyards.Gray-walled and featureless twisting streets suddenly reveal a vista of an imposing mosque with the blue-and-gold ceramics of its domes and minarets flashing in the hot sun. The noise and press of heavily clad humanity and overloaded beasts can immediately give way to quiet and secluded residential areas where old men on wooden stools play backgammon with their neighbors. Next to rooftops and open spaces blistering with the dry summer heat are dark alleyways with high walls throwing a blanket of cool shade across their paths.Beside the hilltop madinah,there is a modern suburb with motorways and shopping malls. The city of the MENA region is kaleidoscopic in its range and variety.As one of the cradles of world civilizations, it boasts some of the most ancient cities of the world—Jerusalem, Baghdad, Cairo, Jericho—and some of the most modern—Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Dubai. Despite this richness and color, the reality is, and has always been,more prosaic.Cities in the MENA region,long the center of social, economic, and political activity, are undergoing a profound crisis of growth, of service provision, and of internal social, political, and architectural change. The reality is that amid the vibrancy and variety, city officials are also struggling with overcrowding, poor infrastructure, changing economic means of production, and grand but often inappropriate attempts to ameliorate these problems but that only add to the burden and the debt. The pageantry of the cities of the region is mixed with poverty and pollution. Yet, however one wishes to perceive them, these cities are fascinating and worthy of greater study. The study of MENA cities has also been characterized by a wide range of opinions and perspectives. To illustrate the variety of views and different points that can be emphasized, the editors have chosen to write two separate but complementary introductions. This first part of the introduction, “Reevaluating the Past, Rethinking the Future,” attempts to show how the study of cities in the MENA region can be structured.It outlines the different ways in which cities in the region have been studied,examining the various phases in which different disciplines contributed to our understanding of them.
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It then highlights some of the common architectural forms and environmental or logistical factors that have influenced the development of cities and, finally, some of the profound ways in which they are being transformed. The second part of the introduction,“The Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Seeing Cities Comparatively,” clarifies a range of ways to compare and contrast cities contained in this volume,offers some alternative ways beyond the geographic for thinking about the urban, and ends with a call to link the historical city with the urban world order of today. Before looking at these issues, however, we need to first clarify a number of terms and definitions. First, what do we mean by the Middle East and North Africa? For the purposes of this volume, the editors have generally chosen to define the MENA region as stretching from Morocco to Iran and from Turkey to the Horn of Africa.This definition thus includes the twenty-two countries of the Arab League (including the Palestinian Authority enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza Strip), Turkey, Israel, Iran, and Cyprus. In adopting this definition, we need to point out some of the difficulties inherent in its usage. The usage of the term Middle East and North Africa, although seemingly straightforward, has been quite problematic.Why should these two distinct geographical regions, the Middle East and North Africa, be brought together as a single region? The first is in Asia, and the second, part of Africa. Surely those areas that share the Mediterranean seaboard have more in common with other Mediterranean littoral areas than with those that cluster around the Persian or Arab Gulf. There are considerable climatic and topographical differences in addition to significant linguistic and historical ones. Part of the problem in defining the region and justifying its study as a coherent unit lies in the evolution of the term Middle East as a Eurocentric definition. Historically, the eastern Mediterranean seaboard and the Balkans were known as the Near East, in contrast to the Far East, defined as areas east of India. The Middle East was seen as the area in between. Then, during the First and Second World Wars of the twentieth century, Britain, the dominant power in the region at the time, established a military administration with responsibilities stretching from Iran to Libya, with its “General Headquarters Middle East”in Cairo.The term became increasingly

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used outside the military establishment to refer to this area and was even recognized within the region itself. By the Cold War, it had global currency. (The U.S. State Department has persisted with earlier connotations by combining two terms, with its Near and Middle East divisions, and the U.S. military has divided the same region into European, Middle East, and African commands.) A further problem is the high degree of differentiation in the region when it is studied at a lower level, such as city level. Superficial similarities in culture, religion, and history across the region are quickly replaced by a number of subareas differentiated by geography, climate, and economy. For the purposes of studying contemporary urban change in the Arab countries of this region,Janet Abu-Lughod has delineated five types of countries whose economic makeup has a direct impact upon the functioning of cities.1 1. The economically marginal countries that have stagnating agriculture, little industry, and export labor (Sudan and Yemen) 2. Neocolonial countries whose economies are tied to Europe to the extent they have economic satellite status (e.g., Morocco and Tunisia) 3. The confrontation states that border Israel and whose economies have been distorted negatively from the longrunning conflict (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestinian areas, and, to a certain extent, Iraq) 4. The “Semi-Oil” states that moved from extensive agricultural production to an oil-based economy but whose development was affected by a decline in oil revenues (Algeria and latterly Iraq) 5. The rentier oil states whose oil-based economies integrated them into the world economy but that have suffered from price fluctuations affecting planning and diversification (Libya, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, and Oman) If one were also to consider the very different economies of Israel, Cyprus, and Turkey, the list of types and subregions within the MENA region would be very much extended. To what extent, then, is there any value in delineating a region so differentiated internally as a unit of study, and what impact does this have upon the study of its cities? Like other area specialists of the MENA region, the editors contend that despite such internal differentiation, despite the collapse of a unitary framework like the Ottoman Empire, despite the increased hardening of borders in the twentieth century, despite the recent intrusion of Israel, despite the linguistic, ethnic, and religious differences, the MENA region is still sufficiently interlinked and shares a core of religious, linguistic, and historical experiences to offer a coherent unit of study.Clearly,the Arab core consider themselves a cultural and linguistic community sharing some collective myths and val-

ues, some experiences of resistance to colonialism, and external pressures. The reasons for including non-Arab countries (Turkey, Cyprus, Iran, and Israel) in the MENA unit are also valid. Since the rise of Islam and its spread, first through the Umayyad Empire,then the Abbasid Empire,and proceeding on to the Ottoman Empire,areas outside the core Arab areas were often integrated politically, militarily, and socially, which resulted in the region comprising a relatively homogenous cultural and political heritage. More important, perhaps, than these political structures is the shared religious tradition of Islam, a legal framework derived from a single basic source, the Qur’an, and for a time a lingua franca in the Arabic language among the commercial, political, and religious elites.In addition,the countries of the region experienced a similar pattern of economic relations with the rest of the world. Iran, Turkey, and Cyprus have much more in common with countries inside the MENA region than those outside it. The only exception is Israel, but it is a very recent arrival. Many of the cities of Palestine have a rich history prior to 1948 and continue to evolve in ways similar to those of cities of the wider Arab-Islamic hinterland today. This introduction seeks to answer a second question: what is a city in the MENA region? Our initial response would be to respond that a city is a large urban settlement of a given minimum number of inhabitants with presumably some large historical monument such as a cathedral or mosque and with some administrative functions to indicate its importance as a national or regional center. With this flexible definition, it is clear that the size of population is only an indication,and other specific features need to be considered.The problem even with this broad definition is that it does not take historical change into account. Some cities were not always cities, while others no longer exist. Most readers would soon reflect that ancient and historical cities would not have the same population totals as a contemporary one and therefore could be excluded from the list when at points in their past history they were of great importance. Similarly, buildings decay or are demolished, rebuilt,or renovated over time; therefore,monumental features that were once important are overshadowed. In the same way, a city’s role in the life of the region will change over time as new trade routes are developed or natural resources are exploited or rival cities become the seat of administration, governance, and power. The definition of what is a city, therefore, has to be flexible to take into account these changes and yet not be too broad as to make the term meaningless. This encyclopedia encompasses cities from the ancient period to the modern. Moreover, there is a further complexity to consider. This encyclopedia is edited by two academics trained in a Western academic tradition, with contributions from people also trained in that tradition, and produced and marketed by a publishing company that also works within that tradition. Does our collective understanding of what constitutes a city

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reflect the patterns of urban settlement in the MENA region, or are there subtleties or refinements that also need to be included in the definition we work with? To what extent do our Western notions of city life encapsulate the urban tradition in the MENA region? Can our notions of municipal responsibilities and civic institutions be replicated, and are there other forms of organization or ways of expressing the urban that we would miss if we did not take care? Here we touch upon an important discussion in academic circles that has been underway for half a century. The starting point for the academic debate around how best to understand and study cities was the work of the nineteenth-century German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). His notion of a city was based upon an ideal European type in which there was a “commune”comprising such institutions as craft guilds and chambers of commerce that “mediated” between organs of the state, such as a governor, and the populace. The debate among academics can be simply put: to what extent are cities of the MENA region like European ones, and to what extent do cultural factors such as the role of Islam as an organized religion or continuing tribal structures account for differences? There are four main phases in the evolution of this debate. The first two focus on what the Japanese political scientist Masashi Haneda has termed the “hardware”and “software”of cities.2 By the hardware of cities, Haneda is referring to the urban infrastructure, physical layout, and architecture. Research by academics in these fields has focused upon empirical studies of layout to identify what may be intrinsically Islamic or culturally specific to the MENA region. The results of surveys, or distillations of architectural plans, have been interpreted in a way to provide a contrast with the Weberian European model. Attention is drawn to the zigzagging narrow streets,blind alleys,the separation between the public and private space, and ethnically and vocationally segregated market areas.3 Later academics noted that it was more than a coincidence that these studies took place during periods of colonial rule and accompanied the embedding of colonial administrative structures.And while they were empirically valuable,containing much useful basic data, their perspectives have been criticized for their loaded use of Orientalist concepts portraying the European model of a city as rational and dynamic while that of the MENA region as chaotic and stagnant. For example,R.Le Tourneau’s study of the great North African city of Fez is marred by his manifestly inaccurate observation that “Fez has not changed for thousands of years.”4 This approach also saw the beginning of the academic quest for an allencompassing definition of an Islamic city to match the Weberian European model. The software of cities in the MENA region refers to people and their interaction. In the main it encompasses a range of political and social networks. These include tribal, religious,

or military affiliations; religious practices such as pilgrimages to tombs of holy personages or the extensive endowment system, or awqaf; trading patterns of the locality; and the economic interactions between the inhabitants of the city and the hinterland.Interest in these aspects was seen as an important corrective to the earlier essentialist view. Much work was carried out in identifying institutions such as guilds or networks that could be seen as “Islamic” and therefore likely to have fashioned the character and dynamic of the city.5 These historical researchers still concerned themselves with the Weberian dichotomy but began to adopt a more textual-based methodology—that is, they were less concerned with drawings and maps but more concerned with data derived from Ottoman files; registers of the sharia, or Islamic court system; and waqfiyya, or endowment deed, documents. While some of the work by scholars such as Ira Lapidus was methodologically very rigorous, much of the work suffered from too general an extrapolation from historically specific studies.The studies of the bazaars of Aleppo in the Ottoman period did not and cannot necessarily tell us much about the suq of Marrakesh during the Al-Moravid period in Morocco. The third main phase of debate among academics is the discussion around the usefulness of the term Islamic, both as an adjective and a concept, in the study of cities in the MENA region.It marks the entry of the social sciences into the debate in the 1960s,particularly the sociologists and cultural anthropologists. Their approach is to argue whether the Islamic city exists or existed at all and whether it was merely a construct devised by Western scholars that resulted in an illusory and romanticized depiction of urban forms in the MENA region. Instead,they turned to alternative terms and models to explain the pattern of relations and physical layout of cities in the region. Notable among these scholars were J. Abu-Lughod, K. Brown, and D. F. Eickelman.6 Those adopting this third approach believed that an examination of Islamic cultural values such as qurba, or closeness, and their role in social networks and the distribution of residences, or the presence of Islamic law as a permeating principle in the organization of public and private space, was a more fruitful way to understand the growth and dynamics of cities in the MENA region. They, however, have been criticized for not going far enough in their rejection of the notion of an Islamic city. Their approach merely sought to be more culturally attuned to reveal the underlying rationality in the patterns of urban hardware and software derived from such sources. The fourth approach, the anti-Orientalist critique, is more trenchant in its rejection of the idea of the Islamic city concept. As one who straddles the third and fourth approaches, AbuLughod has written:
How is it that we have a large body of literature about an intellectual construction of reality called the “Islamic city” while

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we have few or no articles, books, and conferences about the Christian city, the Buddhist City, the Hindu City, or the Pagan City?7

This position is that the values and discourses of academe in the Western world have been conditioned and framed by the monopoly of power of the Western states. In turn, the discourse has framed research that is used to consolidate and justify the West’s domination of other cultures and to present the latter as defective and in opposition to those of the dominant culture. The result has been the construction of an Orient and an “ideal” of cities of the MENA region along essentialist lines that overlook, on the one hand, commonalities between the Arab-Islamic world and the West and, on the other, internal differentiation. This view has been widely accepted by mainstream academia, and the current period in research has seen its consolidation and a process of reflection as to whether the antiOrientalist critique is the final word in the quest of the Islamic city. Recently, there have been a number of reservations expressed about how the anti-Orientalist critique has resulted in a tendency to minimize the value of the outside perspective and the detached observer.8 However,there is at present a perception that the variegated nature of the MENA region has been accepted and that comparative work with European cities can be useful to some extent but should not be the template upon which an understanding of cities of the MENA region be based. Almost in parallel with these debates existed another closely related debate, one that has recently come into prominence.This latest phase is derived from two sources.First,there is the growing awareness for the need to conserve the ancient and traditional parts of many of the cities in the MENA region. As will be discussed below, the rapid changes to the infrastructure and use of cities has led to transformations in the hardware ranging from the wholesale demolition of city walls and quarters to severe neglect and inappropriate use leading to dilapidation and slum conditions. A growing awareness developed that the loss or misuse of these structures would deprive the cities of certain irreplaceable aesthetics and a sense of history and belonging. Second, there is recognition that much of late twentieth-century construction and planning has atomized society and created huge problems of alienation and dissonance. There is thus a growing interest in reviving traditional techniques of design and construction and the use of local material. As a result, a new generation of professionals, town planners, and architects has begun to see the old quarters of the cities in the MENA region as a reservoir of knowledge of building techniques and responses to changing climatic, sociological, and logistical conditions. Akin to a seed bank, they were essential to preserve if future generations were to respond to

new challenges. Assisted and to some extent prompted by international conventions on architectural conservation and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) programs,and on the work of the Aga Khan Foundation, a body of technical literature (but often contextualized by socioeconomic and political data) has arisen and added to the debate. To some extent, by focusing upon architectural issues and having to make assumptions about what values are being conserved both in the structures and the society they frame, this contribution by conservation architects reopens questions about the Islamic nature of the city.It is now widely recognized that the process of celebrating and restoring a heritage is not value free. The identification of what is the heritage of a city is usually carried out by educated professionals, bourgeois elites, and national and international funding agencies. In many cases, they will have internalized Western conceptions of an ideal city of the MENA region or at least be at variance with the needs or aspirations of the usually impoverished inhabitants of the quarters being conserved. These, however, are micro-level policy issues that are the subject of many debates at conferences and in the literature. What is of greater relevance to this introduction is the attempt to identify certain common approaches that have confronted builders,architects,and planners in the MENA region over the ages but in a way that does not weigh it down with Orientalist baggage and dichotomies. Thus, there is recognition of the influence of the climate on both the design of the quarter or suburb and of the structure itself.Hence,the many high walls, domed roofs,covered arcades and bazaars,courtyards,rooftop terraces, wind catchers, slatted windows, and gardens are all designed to both keep out the heat and collect cooling breezes. Similarly, there is recognition of the role played by Islamic jurisprudence in determining the layout and structure of buildings.For example,the degree to which neighbors are permitted to overlook each other’s houses has affected the position and style of windows as well as points of access to the house. The twisting, winding streets, with archways, cul-desacs,and overhanging windows,are an expression of such regulatory principles in some cities.Finally,there is awareness that modes of transportation, generally pedestrian and pack beast of burden rather than cart or coach, has been the key factor in determining the width of access routes and the nature of entry points to the city. As has been already implied, this reevaluation of the past and how it may help in rethinking the future of the cities of the MENA region has been brought about by the rapid changes in the region since the last World War. In less than fifty years, the urban population of the MENA region has increased from 20 percent to more than 70 percent,leading to the growth of huge conurbations and megacities.In addition,there has been a dramatic increase in the population of small and medium-sized

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towns. Likewise, the primacy of certain cities within their states has grown tremendously. Egypt, for example, continues to be dominated by Cairo, with 12.6 percent of the total population and nearly one-third of the country’s urban population. Nevertheless, regional towns such as Port Said, Suez, and Minya are becoming cities with annual growth rates of 3 to 4 percent. This pattern is replicated across North Africa and the Levant. In contrast to the mid-twentieth century, life, society, and politics in the MENA region in the twenty-first century is becoming urban life, urban society, and urban politics. Such an accelerated process of change involves a wide range of stresses on the structural fabric of the city and the pattern of social and political behavior.It is true that increases in urbanization can be correlated with increases in per capita income, as the examples of Kuwait and Israel confirm. Nevertheless,this can be an abstract comfort for those living in substandard housing without piped water or electricity and in areas of high density.Most of the inhabitants of contemporary cities in the MENA region are experiencing not only the trauma of migration but also difficulties associated with integration as new residents and with the attendant problems of orientation, acculturation, and unemployment. This, in turn, is leading to the creation of new political and religious affiliations and constituencies that shift the balance of power and coalition of interest groups. These all combine to produce a fragmented and possibly deeply alienated population whose demands have to be accommodated by state systems that are, by and large, defective and not up to the task of absorbing such changes. The adoption of Western planning, design, and construction techniques and values to establish mass-housing complexes on the outskirts only exacerbates the sense of dislocation.In addition, the flight of the traditional families from the old quarters of the cities to be replaced by new rural immigrants creates an environment where the congestion and overcrowding is not ameliorated and diffused by old family ties and strong communal bonds.All these processes combined have fed much of the Islamic radicalism and militancy in the MENA region.The overall result can be large squatter settlements on the margins of big cities bereft of government services and infrastructure and over which government control is weak or mediated through powerful family or religious interests. In these circumstances, the prospect for heightened conflict and tension is very likely. Michael Dumper Notes 1. Janet Abu-Lughod,“Urbanization in the Arab World and the International System,” in The Urban Transformation

The Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Seeing Cities Comparatively
There are many alternative approaches to studying the cities in the MENA region.An encyclopedia is one convenient and comfortable mechanism for gaining an overview and for beginning such an investigation. The traditional way of using an encyclopedia is to look up a single entry of interest and then move on, returning at a later date to consult another entry. However, the very presentation of information in this type of format frames the understandings of cities in the Middle East and North Africa one acquires in four crucial ways. The first is that cities are presented as discrete entities, ordered alphabetically,which delinks them from other cities with which they may be tied in vibrant networks. The very act of looking up a city alphabetically disconnects the student from the city’s historical patterns of flow and exchange with other cities, stressing instead a vision of the city as an autonomous actor, bounded and self-contained. Such framing does offer substantial benefits, in particular, being able to see the target city across time and to compare any one point in its history with any other subsequent or prior period.A city as a changing and resurgent actor, experiencing its own cycles of highs and lows,comes to the fore.The expansion and contraction, the failures of elites and leaders, the everyday of the city are nicely exposed in viewing the city as bounded and contained within itself. The ancient Sumerian word for wall or fortification (uru-as or duru) evolved into their word for a city (uru); from the very beginning of human civilization, cities have tended to be seen in this way as bounded, contained, discrete. It is important, therefore, that one approaches each city and its trajectory aware of this inherent bias toward separation and the backgrounding of connectedness. John Friedmann calls this the “historic city” perspective.1 In fact, looking across the full trajectory of a city does provide considerable benefits not usually found in most studies of a city: what is readily available in the literature usually emerges from a concern for a particular time period or context. For example, numerous studies of Mamluk Cairo exist, but it is rarer to find a complete review from a city’s founding to the present; in fact, many of the cities in this volume have never received a comprehensive study such as that available for a city such as Cairo. The second result of presenting cities of MENA in an encyclopedia is that it is difficult to carry out comparative analyxxiii

sis. The cities are not framed in a comparative fashion, and so the student must do the heavy lifting to compare cities with others in the volume. If a student can transcend the limits of the encyclopedic format, however, numerous insights await him or her via the comparative process.A first simple level of comparison is, of course, provided by grouping cities of the geographic region MENA together into one package. Yet, as mentioned in the first part of this introduction, even this is not without controversy or challenge.What are the geographic boundaries of the MENA region? What insights get lost if we choose a particular geographic conceptualization of the Middle East and North Africa over some alternative? Are there better ways to define this collective that are beyond territorial and that may be more useful for analytical purposes? This is where comparison comes in, and comparison is somewhat difficult to accomplish given the encyclopedic format. The inquisitive student will want to read any particular entry with an eye out for comparisons with other cities or to approach the whole volume in a more analytical fashion to squeeze greater benefit from the work. For example, one conventional approach would be to compare cities in a particular subregion: cities around the Red Sea littoral or those in the Persian Gulf, along the Nile, or on the Mediterranean. Such an approach should highlight a range of similarities within the subregion that are obscured by a MENA perspective.Another comparison would be to seek out those commonly affected by large-scale historic events: for example, those cities incorporated into the Roman Empire in the East after 60 BC, or the cities destroyed by Temür, or those that entered the twentieth century as colonial cities.Alternatively, comparisons on the basis of roles should be particularly instructive: port cities, pilgrimage cities, capital cities, security cities. The comparison of cities caught up in particular commodity chains or transshipment networks (the Silk Road, spice trade, salt cities, drug cities, slave cities) could be insightful,as would be comparing a number of cities across time (why did Ebla and Ugarit die but Nippur, Izmir, and Baghdad continue to come back to life after destruction?). Thus, comparison of various types can take the student of MENA cities well beyond the limits of the encyclopedic format. Third, the presentation of cities in an encyclopedic format makes it easy to lose a sense of the common themes that

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The Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Seeing Cities Comparatively

cities share at particular points in history: Under globalization, what is changing for all cities in the region? How did the introduction of European economic and military power in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean after 1500 begin to shift political power and lead to imperialism? Why has Islamist mobilization been more effective in some cities than in others? How did the split between Rome and Parthia or Byzantium and the Sassanians hurt the cities along the Euphrates? The astute reader of this encyclopedia should be able to achieve some initial insight into such questions by reading multiple entries. Fourth,limiting one’s reading to discrete city entries misses the opportunity to begin investigating fundamental questions for which we need some explanations: What forces lead to the creation of city coalitions (such as the Philistine, Ionian, Decapolis,Shia Triangle,or Phoenician city systems)? Why are certain cities more able to resist the overlordship of empires or states than others (Tyre and the Assyrians) and to retain some agency in the face of significant pressure? What factors bring a city into global prominence almost overnight while leaving others as dead ends in the world economy? What happens to cities when technology shifts their long-distance trade routes? How can cities reclaim their primacy over the hinterland once it is lost? Where does a city end and its hinterland begin? Perhaps there is no longer any such thing as a “city”that can be distinguished as separate from the regional or global political economy or the “urban.”2 Are the flows and exchange networks of cities more important than the built environment in the way people live the everyday city? Many of the well-known travelers in history passed through cities presented in this encyclopedia, sometimes recording their impressions and comparisons. Ibn Battuta (1304–1368) is one of the best known and most widely traveled. He lived in a globalized world order, conceptualized as the Dar al-Islam, which was grounded on a network of cities stretching from his home in Tangier to Makkah, Zanzibar, Timbuktu, and Samarkand. In his Rihla (full title, A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling), this fabled traveler records how he passed from one urban center to another in the company of clerics, pilgrims, merchants, and princes. Like a spider’s web, the cities that were encompassed within his understanding of his world lay before him, and serendipity often drove his decision to choose one path over another. One way to understand the selection of cities in this volume is to ask whether Ibn Battuta visited this city. If he did, the city belongs in the encyclopedia. Although not every city he visited is included, and although not every city in the volume is a “Tangerine city,” the theme remains significant. Ultimately, a powerful alternative to conceptualizing the MENA as a geographic or state-based concept is that of process geography, where flow and action create the boundaries rather than having them decided arbi-

trarily on a reading of rivers, seas, mountains, or temporary state regulations.3 Thus,within this encyclopedia is imbedded an alternative conceptualization of the MENA that sees the region as emergent from an armature of cities connected by various flows of exchange, ideas, and effect.The region can be conceived as the result of lived cities and flows, connected across a range of networks, rather than seeing the region as determining the cities to be included. Thus, this volume includes a number of cities that may produce a fairly strong response: those are not MENA cities, one might say of Timbuktu, Zanzibar, Samarkand, and Baku.Yet from a flow point of view, it can be argued that they were “edge cities” for the MENA: nodes where flows of trade, religious training, credit, or guns ended or were transformed into something else. A careful comparative reading of the entries in this volume can reveal a moving set of edges to the MENA across time cycles of ebb and flow where boundaries shift as cities become included or excluded from patterns of exchange. Marco Polo cities, those mentioned by Strabo, cities visited by Leo Africanus, and Richard Burton’s exotic destinations are all other ways to see edges to the MENA regions underlying city structure. One could argue that Dubai and Tel Aviv are not Middle Eastern cities because of their tight connections beyond the region rather than within its geographic definition; or that Baghdad was, during the 1990s sanctions, excluded and cut off from being a Middle Eastern city, existing in a black hole.4 The careful reader will also find examples of cities actively pursuing their own power and agency within national and imperial frameworks,despite our general assumptions of limited municipal control and domination. Municipal foreign policy,where cities reach out transnationally to shape and form their own destiny, has existed throughout recorded history. Examples of aggressive, proactive elites pursuing the interests of their own cities are in strong evidence in the current global context,but a comparative analysis using this volume demonstrates that this is not just a twenty-first-century phenomena related to “globalization.” The reader could actually come away from this encyclopedia affirming the ongoing power of cities to overcome layers of bureaucracy and domination rather than accepting conventional wisdom that frames the historical record as one of imperial or national control over local elites. This encyclopedia is full of examples of resurgent, creative, and dissimulating cities whose actors struggle against their loss of control over their own destiny and often win. In fact, the volume might be read as a hymn to urban resilience, perseverance, and continuation, despite all the examples of violence, destruction, and restriction it contains. There certainly is a disturbing record of violence, pain, hatred, and destruction contained in these 100 stories. Read from the point of view of conflict and conflict management, there is not a city contained here that has not been besieged,

The Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Seeing Cities Comparatively

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invaded, sacked, raided, or forced to offer ransom. Interestingly, some cities are more prone to destruction than others, and it is not always just the luck of the draw. Rather, political savvy on the part of local leaders, available wealth and resources, location, arrangements with other cities for protection,or depth of hinterland and water are often determinative. Read from another direction,however,many cities experienced long periods of peace and prosperity, and not just by dominating their neighbors or through naked power. Particularly, the cult or Holy Cities drew strength from a different source than did mercantile, security, or capital cities for their longevity.Vanity cities, created by emperors or kings as monuments to their glory, have various histories: some disappear without a trace after a generation or two; others are able to build a broader role and to exist into the future when the power slips away. Security cities seem, interestingly, to remain security cities across much of their trajectory; is this simply location or something more complicated? Ultimately, cities are at the core of the struggle for power in human society, and it is within them and about them that conflict occurs and where conflict transformation must also take place. This was as true in the Uruk of 3000 BC as it is in the Baghdad of 2006. If the cities of the Middle East and North Africa are to live up to their history as the central core of human civilization, they must be the sites where humans discover ways to overcome inevitable human conflict, to handle it, and to transform it into a viable urban future. These 100 cities do not claim to represent the “top,” most important, or “critical” cities in the region. Of course, there is some of that justification in the selection of many of them.But many “less important”cities are included here as well.In fact, one of the realizations that emerges from reading all these entries is that each city has a fascinating story to tell, and its trajectory is just as interesting as that of its neighbor. There are “8 million stories in the Naked City,” and presented here are just a few of them; likewise, these 100 stories could be combined with 1,000 more, and it would still be enlightening reading.

So, choose to take a journey back 4,000 years to the foundations of a single historical city and watch it grow, SimCitylike in its evolution and development. Or start from the urban present, with its poverty, illegal cities, gray economies, and hope,and look for shared struggles.Jump from the ports of the Atlantic to the shores of the Arabian Sea, or from the oases of the central Asian steppes to the banks of the Niger Bend. Uncover dead cities forgotten by those who build houses within their ruins, explore boomtowns that appear where humans have never lived before, or watch phoenix cities reemerge again and again across millennia of human history. But remember, as you read, the people living their lives in this place and using these networks, those who built the city and called it home.Lewis Mumford, in his magisterial volume The City in History, looked both forward and to the past:
If we would lay a new foundation for urban life, we must understand the historic nature of the city, and distinguish between its original functions,those that emerged from it,and those that may still be called forth. Without a long running start in history, we shall not have the momentum needed, in our own consciousness,to take a sufficiently bold leap into the future.5

Middle East and North African Cities North Africa and Egypt Red Sea and East Africa Eastern Mediterranean Mesopotamia Iranian Plateau and Central Asia Persian Gulf and Arabia Anatolia

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Middle East and North African Cities

• Tangier
Rabat t Casablanca

• Oran

•Algiers

Tunis

•
S • Sfax

• •

•

Meknes

•

• Fez • Sijilmassa

Marrakesh

Tripoli

•

North •
Nouakchott Timbuktu

Africa

and

•

The following cities featured in this book have been left off of the map for legibility reasons: Samarra Babylon Nippur Zubair Jericho Ramallah/al-Bireh Beersheba Tyre Hamah Hims Antakya Ebla Iznik Ephesus Nineveh

A
Abadan Population: 350,000 (2005 estimate) Abadan lies on a small island just off the Iranian coast of the Shatt al-Arab just in from the head of the Persian Gulf. Until recently the site of the largest oil reﬁnery in the world, this small city was originally known for its role as the guardian to the Shatt al-Arab and as home to Suﬁ monasteries and holy shrines. For the last 100 years, Abadan has been a “company town,” created initially by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) and now run by the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) to house the labor employed in the extraction and processing of Iranian oil. One of the most famous ports in the world, Abadan is home to a signiﬁcant Arab minority and remains caught up in regional tension and conﬂict. Abadan (Arabic, Abadan) lies in the southeastern province of Khuzistan,Iran,in the delta of the Shatt al-Arab.It is the terminus of major oil pipelines and is a key oil-reﬁning and shipping center. Abadan Island is about forty miles long and between two to twelve miles wide,depending on the height of the tide. Abadan is not a natural island but emerged when the local rivers were linked to the Shatt al-Arab by a canal. Largely covered by salt marshes in the past, Abadan’s soil remains highly salinated, and native crops are limited to dates and henna. The city lies some forty miles from the open Gulf and eight miles south of the port city of Khorramshahr (Muhammara). Until the late 1800s, there were no islands south of Abadan in the Shatt al-Arab; those that now exist have been created by silt deposits since that time. There is little agreement on the source of the name Abadan. It may derive from the Arabic abbad (worshipers), referring to the shrines and holy sites that dot the island. An alternative foundational myth is that the town was founded between AD 695 and AD 714 by Abbad b. Hosayn Kabeti as a garrison town and subsequently was named after him. A third suggestion, by Iranian etymologists, points to the derivation of ab (water) and the root pa (to watch or guard), from which they eventually arrive at “coast guard station.” As early as the campaigns of the Assyrian Sennacharib (ca. 700 BC) there is reference to an island at the mouth of the Euphrates, and Ptolemy refers to the island of Apphana. Pliny refers to the island in the ﬁrst century AD, as does the great Arab geographer Yaqut (1179–1229), who mentions Abadan as the port at the mouth of the Euphrates. By the fourteenth century, Abadan was six miles from the open sea. By the 1900s, it was twenty miles from the open Gulf.
1

Reﬂecting a similar trend as its neighbor Basrah, Abadan was the site of the ﬁrst Suﬁ khaniqa (guest house) and madrasa in Persia, established in 767 by Abd-al-Wahid ibn Zayd and his followers. The island remained an important center of Suﬁsm for the next 100 years before the monastery was destroyed in 874. Despite losing the main monastery, Abadan continued to attract pilgrims to its remaining shrines, monasteries, and pilgrim hostels. As a result, the island became known as the Island of Khidr (in one version of the story, this name refers to the prophet Elias who was reputed to have lived here), and thus became a site for holiness and contemplation. The city’s most imposing monuments to this day remain its shrines. Ibn Battuta, who visited the island in 1326, found a small religious community, including hermits and religious students, and considered spending the rest of his life there as a student of a master. Abadan also played a role as a garrison town to ward off attacks by pirates or to control access into the Shatt al-Arab. For the Abbasids with their capital in Baghdad, it was one of their ports leading outward to the riches of the world